Entries Tagged 'Management innovation' ↓

Yesterday in the “Blogtropolis” room at Web 2.0 Expo, Chris Heuer signaled me to take a seat in the director’s chair alongside his for a chat.

Here’s a podcast of our chat. We spent twenty minutes talking about building on-line communities, enterprise 2.0, coping with mind-blowing change, the relationship with informal learning, un-meetings, redefining the meaning of conference, and what I plan to discuss with corporate clients in the next two months.

The divide separating the old way of looking at the world and the new, networked vision is so wide that, like the issue of abortion, you’re on one side or the other; no one’s in between, and you’re not going to change the way someone else sees it.

You either believe the net changes everything or you think it’s a passing fad. You believe augmenting humankind’s collective intelligence will change the world forever or you consider this virtual stuff bunk. If you’re one of the people on the side of tradition, my advice is to skip this recording altogether. You’ll think we’re raving mad.

John Hagel’s Keynote presentation at FastForward has a vital message for general managers. This high-quality video makes the case for shifting the basic business model from push to pull.

The USER REVOLUTION is in full sway.

The way out of the squeeze is to move from programs to platforms. He’s not talking about media. Rather, programs are push, content, and structured (as with software). Platforms are frameworks, networks, flexible, and loosely coupled. It won’t be an easy transition; many companies will die along the way. (The lifespan of an S+P company is already down to 15 years, an 80% drop from historical levels.)

Hagel suggests three pragmatic, future-oriented metrics:

ROA. return on attention. What’s your profitability by customer segment? How do you encourage serendipity? How easy do you make it?

ROI. return on interest. gather profile information from experiences to deepen relationships. this goes for customer and supplier. what’s the ratio of hassle to value?

ROS. return on skills. this gets tougher to measure as platform customers DIY and co-create.

Hagel is talking about corporations but the processes he describes are like fractals, the patterns are the same if you zoom in a level or zoom out.

Learning organizations need to be working the same metrics, for they face the same squeeze. The fight for attention and the development of talent are hardly new to CLOs. However, effective CLOs will spot a silver lining in the coming revolution: the opportunity to get out of the training business and into the talent development sphere.